Terse

Applications for new uses of generic drugs are reviewed under different standards than those for novel treatments.

FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD | THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

For two years the truckers were classified as “essential” workers and therefore exempt from vaccine mandates. An estimated 85% of them are vaccinated. Yet Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who heads a minority government, has chosen this moment to order that truckers be vaccinated if they want to cross back into the country from the U.S.

The Canadian left is sneering at the truckers and their supporters, suggesting they’re nothing more than right-wing Trumpians. Mr. Trudeau has smeared them as “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” But the push-back against Covid-19 overreach has gone global. In January police fired water cannons at an estimated 50,000 European protesters in Brussels registering their exhaustion with restrictions and mandates. Since December protesters have gone to the streets elsewhere in Europe and in New Zealand and Australia….

FROM RUPA SUBRAMANYA | COMMON SENSE:

They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.

It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.

The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put.

FROM THE DAILY MAIL:

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University who is a supporter of the natural origin theory, told MailOnline the finding was 'very, very intriguing and very, very suspicious'.

He said it was not definitive proof that Covid was engineered in a lab and released, but it signalled that coronaviruses was being studied in Chinese labs very early in the pandemic.

'The two things that really stand out for me are there are these three key mutations bringing the bat Covid closer to the first Wuhan strain. It is very very suspicious [and could be] a signature of the ancestral Sars-CoV-2.'

The Antarctic samples also contain DNA from Chinese hamsters and green monkeys which Professor Young said suggested the early virus may have been grown in animal cells. 

‘All of this is looking like a contamination in the sequencing process at Sangon Biotech Centre... Intriguingly, the contamination with bits of genetic information from humans, green monkeys and Chinese hamsters, those are all representative of cell lines used for viruses. 

'The green monkey cells are used to grow the virus and the Chinese hamster cell line are a very famous line used often to study viruses. It does suggest that the virus had been grown in cells. we can't assume any more than that, [without] the exact dates of when that took place.’

His comments were echoed by Professor Bloom: 'The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it's exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31.

'On other hand, if sequenced in early 2020 then they could be contaminated with some early patient samples and still concord with Chinese government timeline. Right now, it doesn't seem there is enough info to narrow down timeline to distinguish between these.